… is Southern Methodist University, which, despite its beyond-notorious sports past (people keep talking about its death penalty in relation to Penn State), seems determined to get right back up on that particular horse and ride itself into oblivion again. Their athletic deficit is over a hundred million dollars, and they just fired – in an act of obvious desperation – the swaggering bigmouth athletic director in charge of making that deficit much, much bigger.

Like the University of Georgia (which UD has long designated the Worst University in America), SMU has a president who seems a wholly owned subsidiary of the NCAA, a jocko di tutti jocki who will do absolutely anything to get SMU back on track toward another death penalty, either via the NCAA or via institutional bankruptcy.

[…] In the case of SMU, which adds piquancy to its sordidness by including a religious denomination in its name, it’s been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating – last year – a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit. […]